Technology

As a software developer, I spend my life writing line upon line of code with the idea that someone, somewhere will eventually use whatever software I’m building. Assuming that yes, someone does in fact use the software I build, I can only hope that these imaginary people actually enjoy using it! Recently, I received this […]

Things in the “software development” world have changed a fair bit over the last 10 years. In the past, developers used to have to think carefully about the SQL they wrote, making sure that they used well optimized stored procedures on well designed databases with the right indexes on the right columns because let’s face […]

In a previous role, I was tasked with writing a newsletter email sender. How hard can this be, I thought to myself, and set off to complete my mission. Initial Thoughts We were probably going to be sending tens of thousands of emails at a time so although I figured I’d need to use some […]

In ASP.NET web applications, the Response.Redirect(string url) method is often used to control the flow of an application (both user browsing and logic) by redirecting the client to a different URL. For example, on a page that requires an authentication user, it is quite standard to first check if the user is logged in and […]

Working in Europe has introduced me to the world of localization and skinning web applications. Not only do we have to support several different locales for the same web application, but in some cases, depending on the host url, the site should be skinned completely differently. A common reason for needing to do this is […]

I had a great time at uni. I spent 4 years working my ass off trying to do as well as I could in my sometimes-impossibly-hard Comp Sci and Maths courses. Sure, I also met a lot of fun people, did a lot of fun stuff, held down a part-time Comp Sci tutor job and […]

During my career as a Software Engineer, I have seen a variety of different approaches to ‘deployments’. This is one aspect of the software development life cycle that wasn’t touched on at all during my 4 year Computer Science degree and seems to be a point of contention for a lot of software companies. In […]

I recently built a new ASP.NET MVC 3 (.NET 4) web application which unfortunately has be hosted on Windows Server 2003 running IIS 6. Guess I’d figured getting it running on IIS 6 would be as easy as installing .NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 3 on the server… but it wasn’t. This isn’t a step […]